All right, so here it is, finally. Just to let you know, there are some nice things about this map, but for the sake of this review I’m going to be really nit picky. So in the unlikely event of the map author finding this review: please don’t hate me.
For the duration of this review I’m going to call the map creator Dave (because I can’t be arsed to find his user name.)
So, taking it from the top…
I spawned in what appears to be a bar, maybe it’s a house. Dave has gone and used brush based lamps hanging from the ceiling. A strange choice when there are perfectly good lamp models that look almost the same and are not blocky. There is very little detail in this room and the things that are here are so spaced out. It’s like an art exhibit. With the lights highlighting each piece. There is a bar table (I think), a table and chairs, a gun cabinet and a medical cabinet. Also if you head out the back, Dave has put the map creators in brush based letters. Please guys, if you’re going to put your names in your maps use overlays/decals, brush based words just use up map resources and generally don’t look very professional (suppose this means I know the mapper’s name, meh, I like ‘Dave’ so I’m going to use it anyway). It appears that by clicking/walking up to any of the four ornaments you will be transported outside. It would be better to have some kind of indication that they take you outside, and maybe make more sense. I never knew that touching beer bottles transports you to different worlds.
So I click on the table and chairs and get teleported outside. The first thing I notice is the strange use of alpha on displacements. A lot of the floor is a cliff face texture and some of the walls are, what appear to be, a floor texture. The obvious repetitive texture rape doesn’t help either.
Looking down there is a road, a very broken, inconsistent road. The turns are very badly matched up. Just a block stuck between the two roads. Actually, you know what would make it a hundred times better, if Dave had actually used the overlay that the road texture is for, instead of putting it on a platform. This way would make it so much more realistic. An overlay is something you can use to put decals and stuff onto uneven surfaces. Further along there is a 90 degree, 0 point turn in the road. Dave didn’t even make it curved, it’s just a square block.
Moving along, I came to some kind of wood barricade fort thing. There really doesn’t seem to be any point to it, there’s nothing inside it to protect. There’s just a small broken building in one corner. It’s just a random circle/square of wood. At this point I will give Dave credit for one thing, that he has swapped between different ground textures instead of using the same one for the whole map, but I wish he didn’t cover the ground in a wall rock texture. It just looks so wrong. About now I have come to the edge of the map and I can quite clearly see how Dave has not bothered to match up the map with the skybox, instead just ending it in a steep slope of pointy hills.
There is a ‘train track’ that runs through the map. At my end there is some random collapsed building on the tracks. Would have been much nicer if he used a caved-in tunnel. The building just comes out of no-where. The train track itself is rather boring. It could do with some sleepers, why not use the train track model itself.
Now I come to the first of a series of buildings. This one is completely covered in a brick wall texture...
PLEASE STOP DOING THIS!
Don’t put textures that are clearly wall textures on ceilings and floors. Vary your textures. Use a floor texture for the floors. The other thing is that part of this building is a displacement block, why? What good is that? Dave didn’t even use the displacement; he just shifted it a tiny bit so it is spiky in one corner. Why are your bricks spiky? Inside there is a small fire in the corner with no source, just stick some broken wood or some brush cuboids with the burnt wood texture in there. Don’t leave it blank.
The concrete building next to it doesn’t appear to have taken any damage compared to the brick building next to it. This raises the issue that is present even in fallout 3. You can’t have destroyed buildings next to completely intact ones. It just doesn’t work like that. It’s so dumb when, in fallout 3, I come across a perfectly intact wooden house with destroyed concrete buildings around it. Round the back of the concrete building a piece of the wall has melted. I can see that Dave was trying to make it look destroyed but displacement destruction only really works on materials that bend in that kind of way, like metal. Concrete doesn’t melt or bend, it breaks and crumbles.
Past these two buildings is the biggest building in the map. A big metal block with a ‘tech’ sign above it. But, inside, it’s just a big empty warehouse. It looks like some kind of sci-fi building or something, which doesn’t really make sense since the rest of the map isn’t futuristic. I thought I would have more to say on the biggest building in the map but that’s pretty much it, there isn’t anything else other than a few random props on the first floor and an elevator that sparks a lot.
Following down the train tracks there is a big random hill with wooden docks sticking out of the sides. Their purpose eludes me since you can run up the side of the hill in, like, a second. Along the railway there are a couple of wooden shack things, both with peculiar roofs. On the top they are all slanted but underneath they are flat so essentially it’s just a massive metal/wooden block for a roof. I would also suggest that the wooden roof should have the planks go horizontally or at least be consistent with each other.
I almost completely missed the door inside, was about to zoom off to the next location. Basically the inside of the shack is buried in sand, along with some kind of cupboard door, and despite the massive amounts of sand the door can easily open and close. Would be good to have it broken off instead, sticking out of the sand in an angled position so you can still get inside the cupboard. Probably not the best door skin to use either, since it looks like an outside door.
The second shack is kind of weird. Like, there are two separate buildings but to get in one building you have to go through another. It’s kind of like having one of those wooden tool sheds that you buy at B&Q and then you stick it right in front of your back door.
There’s this nicely designed caravan thing, well, sort of nice. Dave could have used the arch tool for the curved bit instead of using the cylinder tool and denying access to the front of the caravan. I guess I shouldn’t complain about this since I do it sometimes by accident (as dingle so kindly likes to point out) but some of the ground is sticking up through the floor. There is also this horrible brush based door which doesn’t match up to the frame properly and stretches the texture it uses.
This is really starting to drag on…
So yeah, I’m at the gas station and you know what? It’s ok. If I said anything bad about it, it would be really petty stuff. Maybe about the indoor wooden planks not going the same way as the ones on the outside and that it’s missing any kind of shop place to pay for the petrol.
Moving towards the train station there is another god awful turn in the road. This time Dave used a displacement, but this only serves to highlight the blockyness of the road. At the station now, where to start? First of all there are a bunch of windows on the side. Something that should be remembered is that there should always be space for the actual floor to go between the windows. You see those glass buildings, that are just windows. There is always a fake row of windows for the area where the floor goes. Looking round the side of the building with the windows it’s seen that Dave hasn’t made it big enough for it to operate as a building.
Inside there is repetitive use of a trim texture on the wall and a girder texture for the ceiling and roof. Remember, unless you have a damn good reason it’s best to use textures in areas that they are meant to be used. The lights use the generic light entity. I would recommend that you use light_spot in most if not all situations.
Suppose I have to say something about the train. Well, it’s a box I suppose. It just looks boring. The windows, position of the controls and design of the controls are all very unrealistic and half assed. The lights on the front don’t even use light textures, just some random metal texture. To be fair the turns in it’s movement match the track quite nicely.
Past the train station is a military base/rocket silo thingy. It mainly just has a ton of props randomly thrown about with no purpose but to hide the bare bits otherwise know as prop-whoring (maybe I will talk about that in a later review as it’s a large topic I’d like to cover). There’s these weird ditches in the ground, don’t know what they’re for. There is a destroyed section of the wall with the wrong textures used on the destroyed wall parts. With the normal wall texture on the inside of the broken wall.
The silo cover designs are not bad, if a bit blocky. Then, at the corner of the base there is just this giant metal penis/rocket thing. It could do with a variation in textures and maybe make it actually look like a rocket. In the very corner there is some kind of building you can access through a vent (I think) or by pressing the button by the door (which closed on me and killed me while I was inspecting the underside). The first thing I notice is that there is a grate texture on the side of the grate. Be much better to put a brush round the edges of the grate or even just have the side a solid texture.
You can see out the window into the skybox where it shows some kind of launching pad (which is kinda cool). If you press a button alarms and stuff will go off and headcrab canisters will be launched and land in the middle of the map, if your playing the map on fallout mod that is, doesn’t do it on it’s own. Guess that covers the silo base thing.
Moving onto the swamp. Passing by random rubble of buildings in the middle of nowhere and… oh god, there’s a tree that I never noticed before that’s like bent over at a 70 degree angle. Infact there are a few of them placed about the swap area. This is probably the cliff tree straightened out so the base is level with the ground, but it looks so silly.
In the swamp there are two concrete buildings, both are surrounded by walls with no clear entrance. So basically someone build a house, and then put an impenetrable concrete wall around it with no entrance or exit. Course, the wall has taken some damage and some of it has been destroyed so you can get past the wall. Inside there is all this random rubble with no obvious source (I know, I still have to fix that pile of rubble in the subway). There is even a random pile of rubble on top of the roof.
The second building has one entrance which leads down into a basement, this raises the question of what the rest of the building is for. It seems to just be a big obsolete concrete block. The texture on the wall isn’t aligned properly with a waterline half way up the wall and a clean wall below that. Inside the displacement is cutting through the wall. Inside there is a two door filter thing which uses a bunch of stairs textures on the walls and it just looks so horrible. The basement is pretty bare with nothing but two vents, a table, chairs and a counter. The counter itself uses random combine textures which don’t go with the surrounding use of textures.
Finally heading back now, past the gas station, along the road and past the train tracks. There is a pile of cars in the road. Dave has stuck one of the cars into the actual road but the road doesn’t appear to have taken any actual damage there. Same with the tanker next to it. At the bottom of the road is a barn, its not so bad actually, some nice brush detail. Just isn’t that much to it though. There isn’t really anything inside. My only real problem with it is how there is a lamp that is on but does not cast any light.
Right in the corner of the map is a sort of store. The windows keep flashing me, I guess that’s because Dave used a decal with a non-decal texture. The roof on the front bit is a weird too. The store is kind of bare, with everything too spaced out. The items it sells are pretty random. It sells a small selection of furniture, baby dolls, suit cases, pots, kettles, giant wash machines, some kind of scientific blast container and some other stuff. The store room it has to keep all this stuff in is really small.
Everything there just needs more of the same thing, a quick copy and paste job would be good. More aisles and more checkouts, it would also have been nice to open up to the roof instead of cutting off that section with a square block.
So yeah, I’m now back where I started. I guess I kind of messed this review up by going through it bit by bit instead of talking about it in different categories such as optimisation and detail.
Oh well, thanks for reading my review. <3
For the duration of this review I’m going to call the map creator Dave (because I can’t be arsed to find his user name.)
So, taking it from the top…
I spawned in what appears to be a bar, maybe it’s a house. Dave has gone and used brush based lamps hanging from the ceiling. A strange choice when there are perfectly good lamp models that look almost the same and are not blocky. There is very little detail in this room and the things that are here are so spaced out. It’s like an art exhibit. With the lights highlighting each piece. There is a bar table (I think), a table and chairs, a gun cabinet and a medical cabinet. Also if you head out the back, Dave has put the map creators in brush based letters. Please guys, if you’re going to put your names in your maps use overlays/decals, brush based words just use up map resources and generally don’t look very professional (suppose this means I know the mapper’s name, meh, I like ‘Dave’ so I’m going to use it anyway). It appears that by clicking/walking up to any of the four ornaments you will be transported outside. It would be better to have some kind of indication that they take you outside, and maybe make more sense. I never knew that touching beer bottles transports you to different worlds.
So I click on the table and chairs and get teleported outside. The first thing I notice is the strange use of alpha on displacements. A lot of the floor is a cliff face texture and some of the walls are, what appear to be, a floor texture. The obvious repetitive texture rape doesn’t help either.
Looking down there is a road, a very broken, inconsistent road. The turns are very badly matched up. Just a block stuck between the two roads. Actually, you know what would make it a hundred times better, if Dave had actually used the overlay that the road texture is for, instead of putting it on a platform. This way would make it so much more realistic. An overlay is something you can use to put decals and stuff onto uneven surfaces. Further along there is a 90 degree, 0 point turn in the road. Dave didn’t even make it curved, it’s just a square block.
Moving along, I came to some kind of wood barricade fort thing. There really doesn’t seem to be any point to it, there’s nothing inside it to protect. There’s just a small broken building in one corner. It’s just a random circle/square of wood. At this point I will give Dave credit for one thing, that he has swapped between different ground textures instead of using the same one for the whole map, but I wish he didn’t cover the ground in a wall rock texture. It just looks so wrong. About now I have come to the edge of the map and I can quite clearly see how Dave has not bothered to match up the map with the skybox, instead just ending it in a steep slope of pointy hills.
There is a ‘train track’ that runs through the map. At my end there is some random collapsed building on the tracks. Would have been much nicer if he used a caved-in tunnel. The building just comes out of no-where. The train track itself is rather boring. It could do with some sleepers, why not use the train track model itself.
Now I come to the first of a series of buildings. This one is completely covered in a brick wall texture...
PLEASE STOP DOING THIS!
Don’t put textures that are clearly wall textures on ceilings and floors. Vary your textures. Use a floor texture for the floors. The other thing is that part of this building is a displacement block, why? What good is that? Dave didn’t even use the displacement; he just shifted it a tiny bit so it is spiky in one corner. Why are your bricks spiky? Inside there is a small fire in the corner with no source, just stick some broken wood or some brush cuboids with the burnt wood texture in there. Don’t leave it blank.
The concrete building next to it doesn’t appear to have taken any damage compared to the brick building next to it. This raises the issue that is present even in fallout 3. You can’t have destroyed buildings next to completely intact ones. It just doesn’t work like that. It’s so dumb when, in fallout 3, I come across a perfectly intact wooden house with destroyed concrete buildings around it. Round the back of the concrete building a piece of the wall has melted. I can see that Dave was trying to make it look destroyed but displacement destruction only really works on materials that bend in that kind of way, like metal. Concrete doesn’t melt or bend, it breaks and crumbles.
Past these two buildings is the biggest building in the map. A big metal block with a ‘tech’ sign above it. But, inside, it’s just a big empty warehouse. It looks like some kind of sci-fi building or something, which doesn’t really make sense since the rest of the map isn’t futuristic. I thought I would have more to say on the biggest building in the map but that’s pretty much it, there isn’t anything else other than a few random props on the first floor and an elevator that sparks a lot.
Following down the train tracks there is a big random hill with wooden docks sticking out of the sides. Their purpose eludes me since you can run up the side of the hill in, like, a second. Along the railway there are a couple of wooden shack things, both with peculiar roofs. On the top they are all slanted but underneath they are flat so essentially it’s just a massive metal/wooden block for a roof. I would also suggest that the wooden roof should have the planks go horizontally or at least be consistent with each other.
I almost completely missed the door inside, was about to zoom off to the next location. Basically the inside of the shack is buried in sand, along with some kind of cupboard door, and despite the massive amounts of sand the door can easily open and close. Would be good to have it broken off instead, sticking out of the sand in an angled position so you can still get inside the cupboard. Probably not the best door skin to use either, since it looks like an outside door.
The second shack is kind of weird. Like, there are two separate buildings but to get in one building you have to go through another. It’s kind of like having one of those wooden tool sheds that you buy at B&Q and then you stick it right in front of your back door.
There’s this nicely designed caravan thing, well, sort of nice. Dave could have used the arch tool for the curved bit instead of using the cylinder tool and denying access to the front of the caravan. I guess I shouldn’t complain about this since I do it sometimes by accident (as dingle so kindly likes to point out) but some of the ground is sticking up through the floor. There is also this horrible brush based door which doesn’t match up to the frame properly and stretches the texture it uses.
This is really starting to drag on…
So yeah, I’m at the gas station and you know what? It’s ok. If I said anything bad about it, it would be really petty stuff. Maybe about the indoor wooden planks not going the same way as the ones on the outside and that it’s missing any kind of shop place to pay for the petrol.
Moving towards the train station there is another god awful turn in the road. This time Dave used a displacement, but this only serves to highlight the blockyness of the road. At the station now, where to start? First of all there are a bunch of windows on the side. Something that should be remembered is that there should always be space for the actual floor to go between the windows. You see those glass buildings, that are just windows. There is always a fake row of windows for the area where the floor goes. Looking round the side of the building with the windows it’s seen that Dave hasn’t made it big enough for it to operate as a building.
Inside there is repetitive use of a trim texture on the wall and a girder texture for the ceiling and roof. Remember, unless you have a damn good reason it’s best to use textures in areas that they are meant to be used. The lights use the generic light entity. I would recommend that you use light_spot in most if not all situations.
Suppose I have to say something about the train. Well, it’s a box I suppose. It just looks boring. The windows, position of the controls and design of the controls are all very unrealistic and half assed. The lights on the front don’t even use light textures, just some random metal texture. To be fair the turns in it’s movement match the track quite nicely.
Past the train station is a military base/rocket silo thingy. It mainly just has a ton of props randomly thrown about with no purpose but to hide the bare bits otherwise know as prop-whoring (maybe I will talk about that in a later review as it’s a large topic I’d like to cover). There’s these weird ditches in the ground, don’t know what they’re for. There is a destroyed section of the wall with the wrong textures used on the destroyed wall parts. With the normal wall texture on the inside of the broken wall.
The silo cover designs are not bad, if a bit blocky. Then, at the corner of the base there is just this giant metal penis/rocket thing. It could do with a variation in textures and maybe make it actually look like a rocket. In the very corner there is some kind of building you can access through a vent (I think) or by pressing the button by the door (which closed on me and killed me while I was inspecting the underside). The first thing I notice is that there is a grate texture on the side of the grate. Be much better to put a brush round the edges of the grate or even just have the side a solid texture.
You can see out the window into the skybox where it shows some kind of launching pad (which is kinda cool). If you press a button alarms and stuff will go off and headcrab canisters will be launched and land in the middle of the map, if your playing the map on fallout mod that is, doesn’t do it on it’s own. Guess that covers the silo base thing.
Moving onto the swamp. Passing by random rubble of buildings in the middle of nowhere and… oh god, there’s a tree that I never noticed before that’s like bent over at a 70 degree angle. Infact there are a few of them placed about the swap area. This is probably the cliff tree straightened out so the base is level with the ground, but it looks so silly.
In the swamp there are two concrete buildings, both are surrounded by walls with no clear entrance. So basically someone build a house, and then put an impenetrable concrete wall around it with no entrance or exit. Course, the wall has taken some damage and some of it has been destroyed so you can get past the wall. Inside there is all this random rubble with no obvious source (I know, I still have to fix that pile of rubble in the subway). There is even a random pile of rubble on top of the roof.
The second building has one entrance which leads down into a basement, this raises the question of what the rest of the building is for. It seems to just be a big obsolete concrete block. The texture on the wall isn’t aligned properly with a waterline half way up the wall and a clean wall below that. Inside the displacement is cutting through the wall. Inside there is a two door filter thing which uses a bunch of stairs textures on the walls and it just looks so horrible. The basement is pretty bare with nothing but two vents, a table, chairs and a counter. The counter itself uses random combine textures which don’t go with the surrounding use of textures.
Finally heading back now, past the gas station, along the road and past the train tracks. There is a pile of cars in the road. Dave has stuck one of the cars into the actual road but the road doesn’t appear to have taken any actual damage there. Same with the tanker next to it. At the bottom of the road is a barn, its not so bad actually, some nice brush detail. Just isn’t that much to it though. There isn’t really anything inside. My only real problem with it is how there is a lamp that is on but does not cast any light.
Right in the corner of the map is a sort of store. The windows keep flashing me, I guess that’s because Dave used a decal with a non-decal texture. The roof on the front bit is a weird too. The store is kind of bare, with everything too spaced out. The items it sells are pretty random. It sells a small selection of furniture, baby dolls, suit cases, pots, kettles, giant wash machines, some kind of scientific blast container and some other stuff. The store room it has to keep all this stuff in is really small.
Everything there just needs more of the same thing, a quick copy and paste job would be good. More aisles and more checkouts, it would also have been nice to open up to the roof instead of cutting off that section with a square block.
So yeah, I’m now back where I started. I guess I kind of messed this review up by going through it bit by bit instead of talking about it in different categories such as optimisation and detail.
Oh well, thanks for reading my review. <3
Epic work by Ostarara and also epic work on the wallpaper which was made by Okie.
Was a nice surprise to see this today so thought it was blog worthy. <3
Thanks guys! <3
Was a nice surprise to see this today so thought it was blog worthy. <3
Thanks guys! <3